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Nuro Upgrades Their Autonomous Delivery Vehicle with External Airbags for Pedestrians

When we last looked at Nuro, the developers of an autonomous electric delivery vehicle, they were on their second-generation R2. To refresh your memory, it was essentially a diminutive car designed to carry goods, not people, and Dominos successfully used them to deliver pizzas in a pilot program in Texas. The hope is that fleets of these zero-emission* Nuros will reduce car trips to supermarkets and eateries.

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Now Nuro’s developed their third generation vehicle with improved safety measures, including self-cleaning sensors and external airbags for pedestrians, “optimized to reduce the force of impact and number of injuries in the event of collision.”

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The idea of external airbags is a good one that has been around for a while; in 2017’s “Inside Auto Design: How People Getting Hit By Cars Has Changed the Shape of Cars,” we explained the dynamics of car-into-human crashes and showed you an external airbag concept by Volvo.

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And in 2019, we looked at German auto supplier ZF Friedrichshafen AG’s external airbags, though those were designed to limit damage in car-to-car crashes.

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For the record, Nuro doesn’t anticipate their vehicles ever crashing into people, noting that their small, lightweight ‘bots can slam on their brakes in a way that no people-carrying vehicle could. The airbags are a just-in-case kind of thing, and jives with the company’s mission to create a friendly vehicle that they hope will “become a beloved member of the community.”

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The photos don’t do a good job of providing scale; the video below gives you a better sense of how tiny (and yes, friendly-looking) the third-gen Nuro is.

*Regarding the zero-emission claim: Nuro says that “in this new vehicle, we’re using 100% renewable electricity from wind farms in Texas to power our fleet and to reduce our overall carbon footprint.”



https://www.core77.com/posts/111665/Nuro-Upgrades-Their-Autonomous-Delivery-Vehicle-with-External-Airbags-for-Pedestrians